Whenever I mentioned to anyone that I was coming down here to Williamsport for a conference of the Association of Teachers of English Grammar, I would get several typical reactions. Why Williamsport, Pennsylvania? Isn't that a strange place to hold a conference? Well, I suppose it is, if one doesn't know anything about Ed Vavra and Syntax in the Schools. And since most people don't anything about those subjects, I just say, "Well, why not Williamsport, Pennsylvania?"
The second question then would have to do with why we need an Association of Teachers of English Grammar. What's wrong with NCTE and the Linguistics Society of America? Well, answering that question in full would require me to discuss the history of grammar teaching in America, which nobody, with the possible exception of a few people in the audience today, wants to sit still for. So I'd adapt the first response: "Why not an Association of Teachers of English Grammar? If teachers of technical writing, the history of rhetoric, Milton, Shakespeare, and general semantics can have their own associations, why not grammar teachers?
Of course, you and I know some of the real answers to these questions. However, ATEG is a young organization, so basic questions are still in need of exploration. The Association was formed to "bring back" the teaching of grammar, and that's at least one reason why we now have an Association of Teachers of English Grammar, but that simple statement of purpose opens up a lot of issues that need to be resolved. The two big ones are:
I, of course, think that grammar ought to be taught to everyone because it has many good uses for everyone. I don't buy the position that we should only teach it to certain groups that need it the most -- writers and editors, for example. In the first place, if grammar can't be taught to everyone, it probably can't be taught to future writers and editors either. In the second place, grammar controls who will be the future writers and editors, for those whose knowledge of grammar isn't sophisticated are virtually shut out of jobs that require broad and deep knowledge of it. And in the third place, language is such a fundamental part of what it is to be human that everyone ought to know something about it, just as they should about other fundamental aspects of humanity such as history, psychology, literature, and mathematics.
However, I'd be the first to acknowledge that these reasons for bringing back grammar are not sufficient. I haven't proved that explicit knowledge of grammar helps anyone, including writers and editors, and I know that there are many important subjects to cover in school, more than we have time for. We don't teach accounting, cooking, or geometry to everyone. People need to specialize. So we need good reasons to teach grammar to everyone.
So this brings me back to where I started, with my two questions -- why to teach grammar and how to teach it. To answer them, I'm going to conduct an exploration -- exploratory discourse. If you're familiar with exploratory discourse as I use the term, you know that the first three stages have already been dealt with. There was a dogma that students needed to be taught grammar so that their oral and written grammar would be better. This dogma proved to be shot full of anomalies, the main one being that researchers were unable to prove any connection between learning school grammar and improvement in the everyday use of grammar. This led to a crisis which was essentially solved by abandoning grammar instruction -- or so it is said, anyway. And now we are in the midst of a search for a new model -- new reasons to teach grammar and new ways to teach it. Much work has already been done on this search, a great deal of it by people in this room. But I would like to take a fresh look and see where I can come out.
First, I must confess that I like grammar very much as a subject of study. My MA is in English language, a program of grammar and philology, and I was enrolled in a PhD program in linguistics for several years, until done in by a course in Polish morphemics. However, as a person who teaches writing and little else, I must confess that I do not now teach grammar to anyone. Yes, I have editing sessions with my students, and I mark errors on papers, and I explain the rules of usage to anyone who asks. But I don't expect much from such activities, and I don't think I get much.
In other words, I have joined the trend that this new organization, the Association of Teachers of English Grammar, was formed to do something about. I have eliminated all formal teaching of grammar, and I don't take seriously those attempts to teach usage that I do conduct. You will find very little grammar in either of my textbooks, and no handbook either. Nor do I ever have my students waste their money on handbooks, drillbooks, or anything like that. I do use sentence combining, sentence modeling and controlled composition in certain situations, but that's a subject I'll get back to presently. You might think that if I were a secondary teacher rather than a college teacher, then I would have more time and reason to teach grammar, but this is not necessarily so. The high school English curriculum in my district -- one of the top school districts in New York State -- has no grammar in it.
Since my specialty and preference is for teaching basic writing, many people find my practices unusual. Other basic writing teachers, it seems, do cover a lot of grammar. However, my practices are only logical extensions of present feelings and knowledge about the teaching of grammar and usage. As far as I can tell, nothing works; the direct teaching of grammar and usage has no good effects, especially on writing. And if nothing works, why bother? I differ from a friend of mine who has written a well-known textbook for basic writing that includes many exercises on grammar and usage. I once asked him about this. I know that he knows this stuff doesn't work, so I wondered why he went ahead and did it anyway. He looked at me as if I were crazy. "We have to do it," he said. "That's what basic writing is all about."
I'll leave you to ponder the various lessons to be drawn from such an attitude and limit myself to pointing out a second bit of information that may be used in our exploration: As my friend's textbook illustrates, when we lament the lack of grammar teaching, we shouldn't pretend that grammar has dried up and died. In colleges, it's alive and well in legions of basic writing class, with a vengeance. I have here a selection of catalogues to show that I mean.
It doesn't have to be that way in basic writing, of course. My publisher, Wadsworth, which also publishes Bill Robinson's book on basic writing, doesn't have a single grammar or drill book in its basic writing catalogue. But for much of the rest of the world, basic writing is grammar.
Grammar is also alive and well in other composition courses, especially a lot of those that use handbooks. Teachers refer students to the handbooks, and the handbooks cover grammar. Furthermore, the rules of usage are usually discussed in grammatical terms. Another college program with lots of grammar is secretarial science. In fact, secretarial science even puts basic writing to shame with its endless attention to obscure rules of good usage. Journalism and technical writing also try to make use of much grammar.
Grammar is also alive and well in secondary schools, despite the situation in my own district. English textbooks, so-called to distinguish them from literature textbooks, typically contain more grammar than anything else. In fact, I'm currently serving as a reviewer for a new secondary series with a tentative title of Grammar and Composition. How innovative! Finally, there is also some grammar in the elementary schools. My son, who is still in elementary school, has been bringing home printed sheets of grammar exercises since the second grade. That's one of the reasons that we switched school districts -- not so much the grammar, which was simple and harmless, but the printed exercise sheets. I don't like them.
Yet there is strong evidence that grammar is not nearly as strong as it once was and that we need a new organization like the Association of Teachers of English Grammar to bring it back. My own students, with a few remarkable exceptions, show an amazing ignorance of grammar. As I related in Composition Chronicle, I found it impossible to have students study literary style by examining the grammar of the style. Secondly, there is no doubt that the major organizations representing English teaching -- NCTE, CCCC, MLA, and the like -- are noticeably cool to any discussions of grammar teaching and reluctant to accept articles on grammar. Even the Journal of Basic Writing prints few articles on grammar. Grammar may not be dead among the rank and file of English teachers, but among our leading institutions it is barely twitching.
A third bit of information for our exploration is that grammar is no longer the exclusive domain of the English department. It now has its own academic department, called linguistics. Almost 30 years ago, when I majored in grammar for my MA, the major was called English Language and was housed in the English Department. A few years later, I went for a PhD in grammar and found it in something called the linguistics department. It's relevant to our exploration to look into why this happened and what importance it has for the future of grammar instruction in the English department. To show what has happened, I'd like to take you on a brief excursion through the history of this subject we call English.
Grammar was not the first subject to be shunned by English and forced to develop its own department. One can see similar things happening in the past. English was once a gloriously eclectic subject, sort of like the Democratic Party, that included everything from philology to public speaking to logic to pedagogy. Then written literature reared its lovely head, and from then on the history of English has been the banishment of one subject after another and the formation of new departments to handle the banished subjects. Logic went to philosophy. Public speaking, rhetoric, and oral interpretation went to new speech departments. Drama, especially performance, went to the theater department. Then, most recently, English language went to the linguistics department. It's true that composition was kept in the English department, but that did not save it. It was absolutely destroyed as a respectable subject -- neglected to an intellectual death and kept around only to support graduate students or because the rest of the school demanded it.
The college English department, basically, has become a literature department and, by and large, a department of silent reading of literature. Creating literature has never been an important aspect of English, and reading literature aloud as an art form disappeared entirely. At smaller public and private colleges, a typical department might have two dozen English professors, and among them would be a single grammarian, a single creative writer, and in a truly liberal department an English educator. The rest would be professors of literature, each of whom would have a specialty such as Victorian literature, the novel, or some such thing. At a big school, literature would be alone except, perhaps, for its abused appendage, composition; other subjects would have their own departments. Pretty much, in other words, the college English department has become an island of splendid uselessness. English professors can teach you the history of British and American literature, a smattering of information about other literatures, and literary analysis. But since only a handful of students ever makes use of such information and skills outside of the classroom, college English has become a school activity and nothing else. Secondary English is a little better but not much.
This is no secret, either. I remember once going into a printing supply store and listening to the printers grouse about the difficulty of finding press operators. It seems that the vocational high schools train plenty of press operators but few graduates go into printing. The proprietor of the store explained why. "They don't realize they're learning a saleable skill," she said. "They think it's just something you take, like English."
However, to continue with our exploration, we can see that all is not lost just because grammar joined other former aspects of English by forming its own department. We need to keep in mind that literature was not entirely to blame for the loss of the other subjects. Most of them richly deserved to be kicked out, although not for the reasons that it happened. Rhetoric, as it was taught in the 1800's, deserved to go. It had been reduced to little more than a collection of stylistic tricks with fancy names. Though there were good rhetorics around, all too often it was taught as something highly technical but irrelevant to real public discourse. And even the halfway-decent rhetorics were just that, half-way decent, because they focused on the forms, or modes, of discourse, not purposes. It was still that way in the 1960's when I began to teach. We got a new department chair who was going to get us into writing, and what did she recommend but paragraphs -- descriptive paragraphs, narrative paragraphs, and the like.
Kicking rhetoric out of English proved to be good for it. In the speech department rhetoric was respected and gradually worked its way back to "real" rhetoric, something that other departments can respect as well. Now this real rhetoric has come back to English, in the composition program. The major concern now is saying something worth saying to someone who needs to hear it. Concern for style and form, while still important, is secondary. We have found that until you have come up with something worth saying, there's little point in laboring over other matters. Concern for details at an early stage in the writing only stops thought.
You can, now, even get a PhD in rhetoric -- and from an English department of all things. This is nothing short of revolutionary. When I started a PhD, fewer than 20 years ago, I had to enrol in an education department in order to study composition. The PhD in composition/rhetoric, now one of the most successful programs, did not exist. Rhetoric, real rhetoric, is the foundation of many --though far from all -- composition programs and permeates English offerings. Too many schools still have only one composition specialist, sort of comparable to their one language specialist, but that is changing.
Likewise, banishing logic turned out to be beneficial. It allowed logicians to continue developing it until it became obvious to everyone that the logic of logicians was not a suitable topic for English. So there have been attempts to develop logics that would be suitable for discourse that employs logical argument in natural language, and these attempts have met with some success. In fact, there are now courses in written argumentation, and textbooks for the courses contain a lot of logic. It's true that many composition textbooks always had a few pages on logic, but never enough to do anyone any good -- or any harm, as the case may be. Old-fashioned textbook logic was not useful to anyone.
And so it went for other subjects in the English department. Not only had they become devalued in comparison with literature, but they had lost their relevance to language as it is really spoken. Oral performance had degenerated into elocution, drama had reduced to Shakespeare, teacher training had reduced to something called the language arts, and so on.
And so it went for grammar, too. It was not just a matter of the English department's hostility toward everything but literature. Grammar, as she was taught when I began teaching, deserved to go.
The reason we're here today is that this happy situation was due for a fall. Within less than 20 years, grammar went from being at least half of the secondary curriculum and a major part of the college composition curriculum to a minor part of both curriculums, at least in schools that are regarded as enlightened. How did it happen? In much the same way as the others were banished from English.
In the first place was the growing professionalism of linguistics, which led to grammar's becoming a more and more technical subject. First we had descriptive linguistics, then transformational-generative, and the last I heard we had case grammar. School grammar, which came to be called traditional grammar, was discredited. We learned that the traditional categories were inaccurate, the definitions were useless if not downright misleading, and the entire system incapable of handling language as it was spoken and written in real life. Yet most of us could not replace traditional grammar with the new versions because, like the new version of logic that replaced the old Greek logic, the new versions of grammar were too technical for us to learn in the time available.
Another blow was the publication of THAT dictionary, Webster's 3rd New International Unabridged. English teachers and language mavens hated THAT dictionary and switched to others. However, the cat was out of the bag. THAT dictionary made it clear that matters of usage were not as settled as English teachers had long believed or pretended. First, they were not as logical as we thought, that is, based on logical extrapolations from the grammar of the English language. Some were rules based on Latin and imposed a century ago, while others were simply the language of the elite imposed on the rest of the population, and still others were made up out of whole cloth. Secondly, the rules as applied outside of school had much more flexibility than we said they did. For example, here is a headline from our local paper, reflecting the gradual demise of the rule that indefinite pronouns are to be treated as singular: When everyone has their say, the work gets done better. And lest you think that that is an aberration, here is an ad for Kodak: This picture was taken by someone who didn't bring their camera. The connection between grammar and usage was thereby weakened, thus also weakening our main justification for spending so much time on grammar.
As if that weren't enough, research was being conducted on whether the teaching of grammar had any useful results. The news was bad. With a few exceptions, researchers concluded that instruction in grammar, at best, resulted in higher scores on objective tests. It had no effect on writing skills, on the correctness of writing, or anything else of practical use. Worse yet, it seemed that the time spent on grammar left students as weaker writers than they would have been if the time had been spent on rhetoric instead of grammar. No wonder grammar has gotten a bad name. And no wonder that professional publications don't want to accept papers on grammar. After such a history of negative evidence, why would anyone accept a paper advocating more grammar? We may argue that the research has produced a blindness to grammar to the point that even the promising new approaches can't get a hearing. That is certainly true but understandable in view of the history of grammar teaching.
How will grammar come back? We now move into another stage of our exploration, a search for a specific hypothesis that we can develop and test. Ordinarily, new models, i.e., new hypotheses, are developed by borrowing models that have been successful elsewhere. Thus, we can discern some lessons in how to bring back grammar by looking at how other subjects came back. This will help us project the kind of new model that we need.
I think the best model for us to use is the model of logic and how it came back to English. Grammar can come back the same way. What allowed logic to come back? As we shall see, there are five basic factors. The logic that came back to English is (1) informal, (2) active and oriented toward production of arguments, nut just analysis, (3) holistic, that is, oriented toward whole pieces of argument, (4) useful to teachers of many subjects, not just logicians, and (5) a successful solution to the problem that we taught logic to solve. All five of these criteria can be met by new grammars. Let us take them one at a time.
To begin with, we can see a model of a new grammar by seeing the kind of logic that has come to the English class. I'm referring to Stephen Toulmin's logic diagram. The Toulmin approach is much criticized by professional logicians because it does not allow you to check an argument for validity and it includes as a single argument that which is, in reality, a web of 2 to 3 arguments. It's a syllogism on its side, sneered one philosopher.
All of that is true but irrelevant to English. We needed a nontechnical approach to logic, and Toulmin is it. The Toulmin approach allows you to deal effectively with arguments in natural language rather than the quasi-mathematical language of the syllogism. It's not an easy approach, and I'm never sure I have the right answer whenever I use the Toulmin diagram to analyze an existing argument. However, that is a strength not a drawback. Furthermore, the Toulmin method can be taught to everyone, not just to English teachers or those who think like logicians or lawyers. I have taught it at a community college, to all types of students, for 15 years, and there is never more than one student per class who can't seem to get the hang of it. Some get it right away and others need three weeks, but nearly everyone gets it.
I see some very promising nontechnical approaches to grammar. Some examples are controlled composition, sentence combining, and sentence modeling. One needs a technical grammar to construct these exercises, but one does not need such knowledge in order to work with them as a teacher or to do them as a student. Also, the best versions of these techniques do not have single right answers but various answers that students may come up with. These need more work and more publicity, but they provide us with new, informal, useful grammars to offer the profession. We do not need traditional grammar, descriptive grammar, transformational grammar, or any other kind of formal grammar. Those who develop our text materials may need it, but workaday English teachers should be able to teach informal grammar with very little study.
The Toulmin diagram also meets our second criterion, orientation to the production of texts. Anyone using the diagram in a writing class may have students analyze existing written arguments, but this is mostly to help them focus closely on arguments and to catch the rhythm and flavor of argumentation. The diagram is more useful in helping students plan their own arguments. It can be used to outline an argument as a whole from thesis to major pieces of evidence and premises, and the counterarguments to be refuted, or it can be used for planning individual paragraphs when students get stuck on individual arguments as they write.
The most promising new grammars meet this criterion as well. Techniques such as controlled composition and sentence combining may not look very creative -- which I think is why they are not very popular. However, the good ones do have a strong element of production, of producing something that is not in the original text. For example, the original texts often lack sophisticated grammatical constructions, so these must be created by students, with guidance from the instructor and from whoever wrote the exercises. On the other hand, sentence modeling is quite clearly very creative and results in something new.
The Toulmin logic diagram is also holistic, which is another modern direction. As I showed above, a student can use the diagram to plan an entire argument, sort as if writing an outline. The diagram can also be used to write individual parts of the argument -- to support or attack particular reasons, for example. However, the student first sees the argument as a whole.
Our new grammar should do the same for us. Writing sentences or paragraphs that are rhetorical isolates doesn't work, even for first graders. It may be that first graders only write paragraphs, but that simply means that their productions are short, not that they are just paragraphs. The same is true for sentences. The building block mentality, in which students first write words, then sentences, then, paragraphs, then whole essays, has nothing to do with the way that real people write.
All students can and should write whole pieces of discourse -- or sections of whole pieces, and the new grammar should help them do it. That's why I prefer sentence combining exercises that result in whole essays, not just those that result in disconnected sentences as with the early sentence combining materials. We do need repetitious practice in all kinds of sentence structures, such as that provided in early sentence combining exercises, in order to get syntactic fluency, and it's harder to ensure that sufficient variety and repetition is built into whole-essay sentence combining. However, it can be done if we just work at it.
Next, the Toulmin diagram shows how something truly useful in English will also have applications to other subjects. I have been talking about Toulmin for a long time, and my first talk about the diagram was on applying Toulmin to statistics. And Toulmin first came into English through the law, through Brand and White's book, Legal Writing. Toulmin himself shows how his diagram can be applied to any subject; in fact, he believes this to be one of the major strengths of his approach.
In like manner, the new grammar must be useful in a wide variety of contexts if it is to be successful. We are finding that American students are poor in lots of other areas besides writing, and that the main problem is that subjects are taught in isolation from their use and in isolation from other subjects. Many students cannot learn things in isolation from their use, and almost all students need more practice with new skills that they get within the 50 minutes per day that the subject is taught. I think that the isolation of subjects from practical use and from other subjects is the main reason why American students are so poor in math, for example. I assume that the new grammar will be taught in connection with correctness in writing, but that's not enough. It must become a practical tool to improve correct writing, not just to correct errors. And it must be capable of being taught in connection with other subjects, as well. At the very least, it ought to be taught in connection with literature, both in reading literature and in creative writing. For example, it's easy to imitate Hemingway, but to understand fully the nature of his achievement requires application of grammar to his texts. One might say that the main reason that so many modern texts sound so ordinary is that writers have not paid attention to their grammar. Developing a distinctive voice is not simply a matter of metaphor and subject; it's also a matter of developing distinctive syntax.
We will need to find ways to connect it to other subjects as well. An ideal place will be secretarial science, although it will be difficult to get those teachers to give up their drills. But it could also be taught in connection with math, especially to help students understand so-called story problems; it could be taught in science, especially in the reading and writing of scientific articles; and in social studies grammar should be invaluable in the study of historically important texts. A successful new grammar will allow the teacher of any subject to apply grammar to his or her subject without having to be a real grammarian any more than someone using the Toulmin diagram is a real logician. For example, the history teacher could use a lesson in sentence combining or controlled composition to show students what would happen if the Declaration of Independence had been written with different grammatical constructions -- and this can be done without the teacher's needing to know much about grammar. You or I could write the exercise, and the history teacher could use it without a bit of explicit knowledge of grammar.
Finally, we come to the matter of correctness. The Toulmin diagram is also proving, I think, to help do for the logic of student writing what we would like for a new grammar to do for correctness. That is, logic has been taught in English because student writing was perceived to be illogical. This reasoning is uncannily like the justification for teaching grammar in English, and the outcome is the same as well. That is, one does not become more logical by the formal study of logic any more than one becomes more grammatical by the formal study of grammar. Students, particularly the older ones, are already as logical as they are grammatical, and what they need to know is when to use what they know. Their preferred response to a dilemma is not to apply logic but to handle it in another way, most likely to test the conclusion they have been offered in terms of their personal interests. With the Toulmin diagram, students learn to apply the logic they already know and to use, in writing, the logical connectors that allow readers to follow their reasoning.
One or more of these new grammatical techniques will also prove, I think, to be the answer to do for usage what the Toulmin diagram can do for logic. Certainly, that is the aim of controlled composition. However, I haven't seen any concrete evidence of success so far. It must be said that at present there is no proven answer to the usage problem. That is, there is no teaching approach that has been shown through acceptable research to bring about a reduction in the number of errors in student writing. The modern approach is to teach rhetoric instead of usage, and hope that errors will go away once students get a handle on content. Or we handle errors by teaching about them during the editing process, what a recent book calls "at the point of need." Both of these are certainly my approaches. As I said at the outset, I long ago gave up on handbooks, drills, and all other methods of direct teaching of usage. Yet this approach has no more backing from research than any other approach as far as I know.
The notion that we cannot do anything about errors is not popular, of course. I remember not long ago being present at an orientation for new freshman composition teachers when one of the neophytes asked what to do about the errors in student writing. I told him that there was nothing that could be done directly about it. If he would concentrate on teaching rhetoric and organization, many of the errors would disappear, but there would be nothing he could do directly to influence the matter. At this point, I glanced at the director of composition and noticed that he was looking like a thunder cloud. It seems that I had revealed one of the dirty little secrets of the composition profession, which is only supposed to be known to composition specialists, not to the people in the trenches. As my friend the textbook writer said, we have to do teach grammar, so the fact that it doesn't work is irrelevant to our daily work.
Well, it's true that we have to do it, but at this point there is no need to take it seriously. I am hoping that the new grammar will figure out the answer, and I strongly suspect that the answer will come about through an adaptation of sentence combining, controlled composition, modeling, or a combination of such techniques. My own basic writing textbook has almost no lessons in correctness, but a friend told me that teachers at his school are adapting my sentence combining exercises for that purpose. At first I was horrified, but then I decided that this makes sense. All of my exercises are holistic, by which I mean that each exercise results in a complete essay. Some essays require application of certain rules of syntax, punctuation, and capitalization, and if instructors want to use those occasions as the basis of mini-lessons, that might be a good idea. For example, some essays use direct quotations, so instructors might use those essays as occasions to coach students in how to handle the capitalization, punctuation, and syntax of sentences with direct quotations in them. With a little organizing and planning in advance, I probably could have ensured that issues of correctness were covered systematically and could have provided instructors not only with an index to the coverage but also some mini-lessons.
Certainly something must be done about correctness. Grammar is connected with correctness in the public mind, and the same is true of the minds of the great majority of writing teachers, who have very little exposure to scientific grammar. If it isn't, there will be pressure to turn the new grammar into the old grammar, which at least has the comfort of familiarity if not success. Also, though the incidence of error is exaggerated, some people have so little control over error that it does hold them back.
Research is not the complete answer, of course. Much educational research has been done on this or that technique for teaching English, and most of it has been uninspiring to say the least. Probably, that's because the researchers had no clear vision of the field they were working within and were just randomly testing this technique or that technique with no expectation of what they might find. Other research, such as that on sentence combining, has been consistent but largely ignored after the first flurry of enthusiasm. Again, part of the problem is that sentence combining was never put into a larger context. However, opposition to research comes from a variety of sources, and that will mean that the problem of the new grammar will become a problem of public relations as much as a problem of academics.
Much opposition will come from teachers of English as a traditional subject, who have been shellshocked by their exposure to student writing and have retreated to traditional grammar either as a hoped-for panacea or as a refuge. These are often people who believe in a lot of structure. They think that it's only logical to assume that if you teach X students will learn X; for example, if you teach capitalization, students will learn to capitalize. They refuse to believe that no one, including themselves, learns to capitalize that way, and so they will not be receptive to methods that get at the same skills in an indirect manner. They are also supported by an enormous and profitable handbook industry. If you write a rhetoric, whoever edits your book will also be editing a dozen or so other new rhetorics at the same time. But a major handbook is not handled that way. It is such a profitable enterprise that one editor will be assigned to do nothing else. And it is so profitable to the author as well, that the author won't want to jeopardize sales. We must admit, moreover, that many of the major people in composition whom we would expect to lead us out of the morass of old grammar have compromised themselves by writing these handbooks. There is also a large industry producing drillbooks and drill software.
At the other end of the spectrum are those who believe in almost no structure for a writing course. These are people whom we all admire very much -- the folks at the National Writing Project and composition specialists like Ken Macrorie, Don Murray, and Peter Elbow. The good people among them will pay attention to research. However, the low-structure approach often picks up disciples who tend to become dogmatic about their methods and would not use grammar even if it proved worthwhile. It also attracts enthusiasts who do not in the least believe in composition. They believe in literature and would prefer to have their students write poems and stories. When forced to teach composition --i.e., something that is not creative writing --the only type of composition that they value is the personal essay, which is, after all, the most like literature. These people are also not going to be receptive to a new grammar however enlightened and useful. The very idea of sentence combining makes them cringe.
So the Association of Teachers of English Grammar has its work cut out for it. I hope that what you have in mind is something like what I have laid out for you here. Some of you may have in mind bringing linguistics to English, and I don't object to that, except that I don't think we can justify teaching linguistic to everyone. Some of you may have in mind bringing back traditional grammar, and I would object to that. I want something that can be taught to everyone and that will be useful to everyone.